Shakespeare Christmas, Harvard Janitor

Meet the man who put his kids through college by cleaning toilets

Shakespeare Christmas carries a cell phone sometimes, but never answers it. To find him, you have to walk the corridors of Paine Hall, the music building at Harvard University, looking for the man in the sensible shoes and the crimson uniform shirt with the Harvard motto on it: "Veritas," the Latin word for "truth."

The new academic year is fully under way now at Harvard, where future Masters of the Universe stroll unhurried across meticulously tended quads and past redbrick walls covered with crawling ivy and suffused with prestige.

Few of the students likely know that the custodian with the implausible name is taking his leave of them. Or, for that matter, that he was ever here to begin with.

But he was. For fourteen years, Shakespeare Christmas arrived on this campus every day at 4 a.m. and scrubbed toilets, washed windows, cleaned carpets, waxed floors, and collected the garbage. He did this to put his own three kids through college—state universities and proprietary schools, in their case—and establish them in solid, stable jobs.

"I could not live if they had to do what I did," he says of his children. "Because I had to ask a man permission to pick up his trash."

Under a fringe of gray hair, Christmas's round, unwrinkled face appears cheerful, though some resentment surfaces while he talks about his life.

He regrets that he did not live up to the expectations of his father, a farmer in his native Dominica, who gave him that grand name. He wishes he had gone to college. But when he was 16, and his father died, he wound up raising his nine younger siblings, scratching out a living on the family farm in Castle Bruce, a tiny village in Dominica named for a colonial-era British sea captain named James Bruce who populated it with slaves to work on his plantation. The name of his town is one of the things Christmas resents. "I wish we could change that," he says.

One by one, the siblings moved to Boston—Christmas, finally, when he was 35. He worked at a hotel as a kitchen-cleaner, and then at a laundromat, before he got the job at Harvard.

"Life takes so much from people like me," he says in a deep, lyrical voice, sitting unnoticed in a corner of a student lounge as a piano sonata seeps from one of the Music Department's busy practice rooms. "So much sacrifice. So much pain. I feel I am being looked down on. If you make it through college, you don't have to go through that."

Many of the students in Paine Hall, Shakespeare says after his many years there, are aware of this. "They work hard. I see some of them falling asleep on the desks until I wake them up." But he adds: "There are some rich ones who don't care where the money comes from."

His own kids, Christmas told them early and often, were going to go to college. "I swore to them that if one of them had to do what I have had to do for survival, I would ignore them as my children on the street. I would pay someone to kill them," he says. "Because there is no value in what I have had to do, as I see it."

Although Christmas's oldest son risked a brief detour into the military, he ultimately got a degree as a computer technician, and now has a good job at the Fortune 500 data-storage corporation EMC. His two daughters both became accountants at Fidelity Investments.

"Every penny that we had, we put it into them," says Christmas. His wife did laundry, and they rented out apartments in a multifamily house they ultimately managed to buy with their savings, in Boston's Dorchester section.

"He wanted better for us," says the youngest, Nadia, now on maternity leave from her Fidelity job as a pension analyst. "He came here so that we could go to school, so that we could better ourselves, and that's what we were going to do. We didn't have a choice. Really—we didn't have a choice. That was our purpose, to go to college. And he was right."

Now 67, his real job done, Christmas will return to a house he built in Castle Bruce, which he also has been renting out for extra income. (After 32 years in Boston, he says, "I don't want nothing to do with more snow.") He keeps photos of it in the basement supply closet he uses as an office, which is impeccably neat and furnished with a castaway desk and chairs and shared with shelves of toilet paper and cleaning solvents. There's also a prayer card, an old clock radio, and a tin of peppermint tea and an electric teakettle.

The per-capita gross domestic product in Dominica is about $14,000 a year, among the lowest in the Caribbean. So Christmas, for a change, will live comparatively well.

More important to him: His children and five grandchildren—who visit him in Dorchester every weekend—already plan to come and see him there.

He laughs and thinks for a while when he's asked if they're more likely than some of the students in Paine Hall to appreciate their educations.

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